Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP · OpenLP from Sapphire Partners

Finding Founders Who Will Change the World with Wesley Chan

·42 min·2 clips

Wesley Chan says the founders he backs want to prove "the world cannot live without my product."

1. Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP, centers this episode on Wesley Chan and his view of how founders and venture investors decide what to back. 2. Wesley Chan is co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, and the hosts frame him as a former Google operator, Google Ventures GP, and Felicis Ventures investor who backed Canva, Plaid, Gusto, Lucid, and Robinhood. 3. The episode asks what it means to find founders who will "change the world" and how a venture capitalist can tell the difference between conviction and noise. 4. Chan says his years at Google with Sergey Brin taught him that work should survive the question of whether it is actually "changing the world," because anything less could be canceled. 5. He describes helping build Google Analytics, the ad system, and Gmail-related work, then links that experience to later investing decisions at Google Ventures and Felicis. 6. Chan uses Gmail as a concrete example, saying Larry and Sergey pushed the team from 200 megabytes to 2 gigabytes when competitors were offering far less. 7. He says Gmail won because it offered something "10 times better" and later "100 times better," which became a template for finding outlier products. 8. He applies that logic to Canva, saying 111 people said no before the company found product-market fit with an image-first, design-first workflow for people under 35. 9. Chan contrasts text-first tools like Lotus 1-2-3, Office, and Adobe with the image-first habits of Instagram and Snapchat users. 10. He argues that the founders he backs see a future where users cannot imagine life without the product, rather than a future defined by proving critics wrong. 11. Chan says founders who are motivated by "proving the world wrong" are less interesting to him than founders who want to prove something true about the world. 12. He calls that difference a source of outlier value and says the best founders know their product will be part of the "daily fabric of life." 13. He says he thinks in a 100-year frame, but timing still matters, and he points to Canva as a company that matched the transition from desktop, text-first software to web-based, mobile, design-first work. 14. Chan says great timing is visible in Google too, because search had the right technology and the right user pain at the right moment even though the company had no obvious monetization path at first. 15. He says expert knowledge can become orthodoxy, which is why he missed Uber and Looker when his own experience made him overconfident. 16. He describes the best founders as missionary founders who can recruit people by selling the mission, not by asking their VC to do hiring for them. 17. Chan says the best venture partnerships are built on loyalty, candid feedback, and a founder who feels backed "for the entirety of the journey." 18. The conversation stays technical but personal, with Nick Chirls and Beezer Clarkson pressing on timing, recruiting, exits, and what makes Chan's approach different from other venture firms. 19. Listeners who care about early-stage investing, product instincts, and founder evaluation will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners looking for market gossip or a quick tour of venture headlines may skip it.

As heard by us

Google-era venture memory, with a real eye for founder judgment.

A career spanning MIT, Microsoft, HP, Google, and Google Ventures gives the episode its frame, but the sharper thread is judgment: how a GP learns to notice the founder who looks ordinary before the market does.

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Why you'd press play

You want a Silicon Valley veteran whose career runs from MIT to Microsoft, HP, Google, and Google Ventures.

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